Game trailer music licensing: why iconic songs cut through

CONTROL Resonant. Published by Remedy Entertainment.

Game trailer music licensing starts with a creative question: which song will make someone stop, feel something and remember the game?

I have worked with music as an artist, producer and music supervisor. That experience has had a really big influence on how I run Clear Music. For me, it is important to understand what gives a song its character, and what we need to keep when we use it in a trailer.

I keep coming back to that question when I watch the CONTROL Resonant Gamescom trailer. Clear Music researched and licensed The Prodigy’s “Omen” for Remedy Entertainment. And for the launch trailer, we helped find and clear The Cardigans’ “My Favourite Game.”

Two original recordings. Two different energies. Both recognisable within seconds, and both at home in Remedy’s strange, unsettling world.

“Omen” brings pressure and a hard electronic pulse. “My Favourite Game” moves fast, with a hook that feels familiar and a little dangerous. The music starts doing its work before the trailer has explained the game.

A song people already care about can make them pause. When every cut lands with the music, they watch again, catch a new detail, and send it to a friend who will get it. That is how a trailer stays with people long after launch.

The original recording brings its own history

Sometimes the artist’s performance is what makes the idea work. The voice, production and memories attached to a recording all arrive with the song.

For Supercell’s Clash Royale campaign, we licensed Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll.” Its title, attitude and pulse fit the chaos of the game. You recognise the track, and you understand why it is there instantly. That makes a trailer layered and interesting.

For me, that is important. Especially with a well-known song, you need to feel that it is almost inevitable for that particular trailer.

A new recording can give a familiar song a new role

Sometimes the melody carries the recognition, while the original recording leaves too little room for the edit.

For Focus Entertainment’s Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy trailer, we created (and cleared) a stylised re-recording of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.” The composition (melody) stays the same. But female vocal and restrained piano opening give it a much more intimate, uneasy point of view. Pulping you into the story instantly. Then the arrangement grows with the picture.

We also work with recognisable (public domain) classical music in this way too. For John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, we reworked “In the Hall of the Mountain King” into “In the Hall of the Zombie King,” shaped around the trailer’s dark humour and retrowave sound. For Team17’s Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, we rebuilt “Ride of the Valkyries” for the edit and recorded it with a 50-piece orchestra.

These pieces also come with associations from film and popular music. Think of “Ride of the Valkyries” in the helicopter scene in Apocalypse Now. For viewers who know the film, that connection brings a sense of scale and unease to a trailer set in Vietnam.

“In the Hall of the Mountain King” has found its way into ska and rock too, with versions by Madness and The Who. People may recognise the melody without knowing Grieg. And that build-up, getting faster and more frantic, makes sense for the chaos and dark humour of Toxic Commando. For me, this is part of choosing the music: thinking about where people might have heard it before, and what that adds to the trailer.

Choose what people should recognise

When we consider an iconic song, I ask what the trailer needs to keep. Is it the original voice and recording? The melody? A lyric? A cultural association? How far does the editor need to reshape it?

Research on video ads adds a useful clue. A 2023 study in Psychology & Marketing found that songs from a viewer’s teens and early adult years can bring back personal memories, with stronger ad attitudes and brand recall. For game trailers, that leads me to a practical question: whose memories does this song reach, and will they recognise it in the first few seconds?

We worked with the same idea on two KFC campaigns commissioned by Dutch marketing agency Truus. We created and cleared new recordings of “I’m a Believer” and “Non, je ne regrette rien”.

“I’m a Believer” was written by Neil Diamond and made famous by The Monkees. For an older audience, that is often the version they grew up with. A younger generation fell in love with it through Smash Mouth’s version in Shrek. The same song brings back different memories for different people, which gives it a broad appeal across age groups.

With “Non, je ne regrette rien”, the familiar sound of Édith Piaf’s song and its use across popular media make the joke easy to understand. That recognisable “no regrets” attitude does a lot of the work straight away. This is what I find interesting about these choices, also in game trailers: people bring their own memories and associations to the music, and those become part of how they read the film.

This is why I want music involved while the trailer is still taking shape. Give the song room in the edit, and work out early whether the original recording or a new performance will serve it best. Our job at Clear Music is to carry that idea through the creative work and clearance, so the team knows what it can use and the music holds up in the finished film.

Our ambition at Clear Music is to be the first call for music licensing in global game trailers. For me, that means being the team people trust to find the right song, understand why it works, and take care of the creative work and clearance properly. We have to earn that trust with every project.

What I really love is when fans already know the song, but hear something new in our version. You can feel the care that went into it. That is the quality I want Clear Music to be known for.

If you are working on a game trailer, let’s talk about the music early on. Bring us the idea, even if the edit is still rough. That is when we can try things together and find out what really works.

-Jarl Hector | FOUNDER Clear Music